It probably wasn’t the best phrase of words to capture the understandable
difficulty of organising security for the Olympics. But there is a greater ring
of truth about what is deemed as acceptable.
For too long, it has been ‘completely normal’ for large providers
to fail to deliver. For years, we’ve been watching the ‘usual suspects’ – the Job
Centre Minuses, the Further Dis-education colleges, the ‘Prime Turkey’ contractors
- miss the mark in achieving real education and employment outcomes for young
people, but continue to devour funding contracts to do more. For years, we’ve watched and waved large
cruise ship charities offload the same old cargo of goods and ply the same waters
of disadvantaged thinking without changing course to bring back fresh ideas, find
different lands, or rescue the local charity canoes capsized in the sizeable backwash
of their egos.
What is completely normal about all this is our failure to
change what is acceptable as the norm. None of this has to be this way. Only a
country devoid of intelligent leadership and enterprise could possibly manage
both large scale unemployment and staff shortages at the same time. It is not completely normal – it is what we
have made normal.
Let’s make a list – and, believe me, in my world, a list is a last resort. Let’s make a list of
every current project, provider, institution, service, where we expect things
not to work or be solved just because they are complex or challenging. And then
let’s think about harnessing the energy and talents that are being wasted in
communities up and down this country to solve those issues.
What we will find is that we have normalised systems of
failure. We have structured failure into the operating software our lives, accepted
it as the limit of what we can achieve, and created commissioning and contracting
conditions to sustain failure as a positive outcome.
How ironic it is, on the eve
of the Olympics, when we are meant to marvel at humans pushing the boundaries
of what is physically possible, that we are so ready to accept the limits of
what we deem mentally impossible. It is
not so much a question of Olympic security that is the issue at stake here, but
how we choose to invest in and utilise the resources we have available to
secure our future.
Every day, it has been completely normal, under this and
every Government I can remember, for people to struggle. For young people, and for old people, to lose what
counts in their lives, at the same time as others gain more than they could
ever possibly need, without adequate checks and balances between these extremes.
What we might calmly pronounce as ‘completely
normal’ in our society - that a TV actor
pretending to be a nurse will be paid more than a person who can actually nurse
- is a choice we have made that demeans our humanity. If this is what is
normal, then it’s time to wallow in that other great English gift: to be a
positive deviant. We need an army of
them. ‘Advantaged thinking’ Olympic deviants deployed
in every local authority, every national charity, and every normally-failing Government provider, to breakthrough what we have 'accepted'. And it certainly won't be a contract
for G4S...
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